[rayiner]

Money from where? Look at the graph of U.S. incarceration rate: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/U..... The inflection point is around 1975-1980--a response to a spike in crime that started in the 1960s. The first private prison operator (CCA) wasn't even founded until 1983 and even in the 1990's, it was losing money.

The whole "private prisons cause incarceration" shtick is the same as "umbrella sales cause rain." No, rain came first, umbrella companies came after as a way to profit from rain.

[John23832]

> a response to a spike in crime that started in the 1960s

Care to back that statement up?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs

Crime and punishment is a for profit business. If you don't believe that... well then I don't know what to tell you. The War on Drugs, DRAMATICALLY increased the prison populations in the United States. States that saw an explosion in their prison populations and that we strapped for cash / didn't care to deal with the incarcerated (particularly southern states) turned to private industry to house their incarcerated populations.

> Money from where?

What money? Taxpayer money. And once private business get's a taste of blood, and politicians in the US get that first taste of kickback money, we all know where it goes from there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_comp...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline

If WE as a society decide that WE want to sent people to prison, WE should have to deal with the consequences of it. WE should be responsible for the incarcerated. WE should be who those prisoners are reporting to. After all, WE should have reform as the end goal. We should't have some black box prison company as the intermediary who's best interest it is to hush, abuse and prevent reform of prisoners in order to keep them coming and their pockets fat.

[rayiner]

The spike in crime started in the 1960s. Incarceration rate started ramping up in the 1970s. Drug war started ramping up in the 1980s. Private prisons started ramping up in the 1990s. https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.factch...

Your theory of causation (kickbacks from private prison companies cause harsher laws and more incarceration), though popular, doesn't explain the data. If you look at the ordering of events, what makes more sense is actually the opposite causation. Crime started going up in the 1960s due to depopulation of the cities and exporting jobs. Drugs got blamed as the bogeyman, which got the drug war started in the 1970s and 1980s. Fed up with skyrocketing crime, people voted for tough on crime laws (by huge margins and often in public referendums rather than legislation) in the 1970 through 1990s. And the last step in the chain, in the 1990s and 2000s, was private companies springing up to take advantage of the massive growth in need for prisons.

[rlucas]

One need not posit a theory of causation here to have a legitimate concern about the role of private industry in influencing the criminal justice complex.

In fact, one could take all of rayiner's assertions at face value and still share GP's concerns.

There are many many examples where private, for profit industry may not have nefariously instigated some governmental program, but surely fights to expand and continue it.

For example, we need not think that WWII was entered at the behest of a nascent aero-defense industry in order to boost revenue, but look what happened. (and ask that lefty Dwight Eisenhower, who coined the very term "military-industrial complex" in a warning speech to the republic as he left office)

Similarly, the utter buffoonery of our health care "insurance" industry is directly a consequence of some mid-century tax code finagling which made health "insurance" a deductible pretax employee benefit. Did those who would someday run the "blues" collude to create that system in some plot? No, but once it was well entrenched, the lock-in started with big money and big influence.

Did a bunch of far sighted conspirators get together to create the mortgage GSEs so that decades hence they could dole out lucrative sinecures? No, but once in place... etc.

The debunking of loosely reasoned talking points is, of course, the brand promise of a rayiner comment, but in this case he goes too far. There most certainly are self-perpetuating loops in government-business symbiote combinations and to deny them is willful blindness.

[John23832]

You're taking to events, that are 15 years apart, and tying them together. But I've given you another event that's closer on the timeline, and you deny it's connection.

The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act was passed in 1970. Nixon pushed drugs as "Public Enemy #1" in 1971. The DEA was founded in 1973. All of these things were done/created to chase drugs. To imprison people who were associated/profited from drugs. All of these things coincide with the prison population inflection point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#/media/File:US_in...

The recent revelation that the Nixon administration focused on associating subversives (black people and young educated white kids) with negative "illegal" actions (black people with drugs and young white kids with communist/socialist) only underscored my argument. Especially if you take into account things like the CIA association with the Contras. The government had/has a hand in making certain segments of society illegal and imprisoning them.

I agree, the public supported a tough on crime approach. They supported it with Nixon, Bush Sr. and even with Clinton. But the government told/tells people what crime is. And it is fact that a lot more "crime" came to our attention at the start of the drug war. A drug war that happened to take place in "problem"/"subversive" communities. A drug war that happened to take place when an agency in our own government, which was tasked with stoping subversion, had it's hand in moving drugs into those same communities.

Move the drugs, lets the drugs proliferate, let the increased police presence from the drug war quell subversion.

The fallout was the prison industrial complex and the private prison industry.

I'm not saying that the private prison problem came first, but at this point they damn sure have enough power and money to make sure that they're not going away any time soon.

[swyman]

Does it need to be the main cause (or even a cause at all) of the initial jump in incarceration rates for private prisons and their lobbying (and incentives in general) to be objectionable? There's a group of relatively influential people and businesses who have a direct economic incentive to prevent the rehabilitation of prisoners and to lobby for harsher penalties across the board. At a systems level, I'd argue that needs fixing.

[rayiner]

I didn't say that private prisons aren't a problem worth fixing. But every time private prisons get trotted out as the explanation for the problems with the justice system, it's yet another lost opportunity to understand the real problems.

CCA isn't the problem. They're just opportunists. Part of the real problem is all the parents and teachers shrieking "just say no!" all through the 1980s and 1990s who voted dutifully for three strikes laws, "probation reform," etc. The other part of the problem is Americans: we're the most violent people in the developed world, with crime rates that are, even after decades of decline, several times higher than in Europe.

[John23832]

> CCA isn't the problem. They're just opportunists.

I agree totally.

[MrFantastic]

Luckily our judicial branch isn't affected by bribes from for-profit prisons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

I'm sure the $45+ million spent lobbying congress had nothing to do with increasing private prisons 'clients' and keeping prohibition of cannabis. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/...

/sarcasm

[wehadfun]

Just want to comment that according to the documentary about the Kids for Cash scandal the media made it seem worse then it was.

Their side of the story was that Pennsylvanian's children correction facilities were crap and he did not feel comfortable sending kids there. He organized a group of investors to pay for a new facility. The real estate developer who got the contract to build it paid the judge a "finders fee" for the referral. The Judges didn't report the money. As far as the harsh sentences the judge was doing that for years as an over reaction to the Columbine thing. It's an interesting doc suggest checking it out.

[winfred]

I think you stopped watching half way through. If you'd watch the rest of the documentary, they provide some details on how that "finders fee" was paid, it was paid out in contracts to one of the judges side businesses and then distributed to other companies to finally end up in the pockets of the judges. Does that sound like a honest "finders fee" to you? I don't care how the judges in question formulated it, the method by which the money was laundered clearly shows the maliciousness of their intent. They even admit it by stating they laundered the money both to avoid taxation and because they "knew it would look bad".

[BinaryIdiot]

> The whole "private prisons cause incarceration" shtick is the same as "umbrella sales cause rain." No, rain came first, umbrella companies came after as a way to profit from rain.

You're right and wrong at the same time :)

The first time someone goes to prison is certainly not the private prison's fault (at least not directly; if they have family constantly in prison that can certainly harm and even guide someone to crime). The problem comes with repeat incarcerations. The private prison is incentivized to have people released with little to no help / guidance and the path of least resistance is returning to crime.

Yes private prisons are not 100% to blame for someone returning to crime. But we have shown through many rehabilitation problems that a large majority of prisoners can return and become productive. But when you're optimizing for the most amount of money you can get (which is currently head count for private prisons) you have zero incentive to pay for programs to help rehabilitate prisoners.

[kazagistar]

Public prisons aren't exactly incentivized to keep repeat incarceration low either. Is there evidence that rehabilitation is worse in private prisons?

[BinaryIdiot]

> Is there evidence that rehabilitation is worse in private prisons?

I could have sworn there was but I'm having a hard time finding a reliable source (just plenty of blogs and anecdotes) so I could be wrong. At least it makes sense to me, logically, but I have no idea if that's the real case.

[wyaeld]

Strawman analogy. There is a key difference

Umbrellas's can't lobby or pay politicians for more rain.

[michaelmrose]

Are you claiming police and prison guard lobbying isn't a real thing?